Grow Your Confidence and Your Word Count

Writing Tips by Theresa Gauthier

Practice makes perfect may be an old adage, but there’s a reason it’s good advice.  I’m going to share with you the most important pieces of advice a writer should get.

Ready for it?

Write.

Yeah, it is obvious, but it’s also legitimate advice.

What’s that got to do with confidence?  Keep reading.

There are a lot of writers in the world, and there are also a lot of people who want to be writers.  What some of them miss is that in order to be a writer, you don’t have to be published.  You just have to be writing.

Writers are a strange breed. We want to write more than anything else, but we also tend to put up our own roadblocks to success.  

We tell ourselves we’re refining our crafts, that we’re learning what we need to know to be better writers.  We attend writer’s groups, sign up for writer’s conferences, read books about writing, read memoirs and how-to books by famous writers and that’s before we say we’re ready to begin.

Even when we declare we’re starting our Big Project, we start to do research.  The novel takes place in Boston, Massachusetts.  We start to research the city and then the state.  It takes place in the roaring twenties, so we research the twenties.  We need character names so we delve deep into name meanings, which leads us to different naming traditions in different nations and cultures.  So many of us spend the bulk of our time talking about, thinking about, reading about, and doing everything but writing. 

It’s the easiest trap to fall into because it makes you feel as though you’re making progress, and none of these activities are bad, it’s just like anything else they can be taken too far.  Be careful that you don’t get distracted from the writing.  

This isn’t to say that every word you write will be publishable  A lot of writing is about the pre-writing and the scenes you’ll cut later.  Some of your writing will be an attempt to see what works.  Some of your writing will be written out of order.  If you’re working on a long piece, you can start out of order.  Write the scenes that are clamoring to be written.  From them may grow more scenes, but if you put off writing them because you’re trying to write your story in chronological order, you may find yourself getting to the moment and finding your inspiration evaporated.

It’s easy to tell yourself that you don’t have time or that you should wait until you feel inspired. 

The truth is that if you wait around for time and inspiration, you will never write a word.

If you’re looking to increase the time you spend writing, try scheduling time in your busy day where you will be able to sit down and write something.  It doesn’t have to be long.  You don’t need hours.  Minutes will do.  Writing in short snatches can be just as productive  or even more so than having all day to write.  I have often used my lunch break sitting down with my lunch and my journal, and eat and write at the same time.  Some days, those 30 minutes were all the time I had, but I made sure I used them.  

Soon I began to take the ten minutes before work, twenty minutes at the end of my day, waiting in line at the bank (okay, the drive-thru at the bank)—wherever I had nothing else filling my time, I’d take out my journal and write.

It was empowering knowing that even if I didn’t finish my novel, I was at least able to say I’d worked on it.

Invest in a book of writing prompts or use a website—or a dictionary!  I had a Creative Writing teacher in college who would select a word and tell everyone to write a story using that word.  My word that year was Tahiti.  A good friend of mine took the class the year before I did.  Her word was Republic.  Find a dictionary, flip to a random page and point to a random word and whatever that word is, whatever it inspires, that’s what you write.

If you find yourself unable to write on paper or on a computer screen, write in your head.  Get to know your characters.  Think about them.  Work out their backgrounds and their backstories.  Think about how they would interact with each other.  Imagine little scenes or vignettes.  It doesn’t matter if you ever use this information.  Knowing it will make your characters richer, more alive on the page.  

When I’m stuck in traffic, I’m often thinking about my characters and what they should or shouldn’t, would or wouldn’t do in certain situations—and what might make them cross that line and do those very things I think they won’t.  I’ll sometimes go to sleep at night thinking about that one plot point that I can’t get quite right.  All of this is still writing, and just like everything else in life, the more you do it, the better you’ll be. 

Write as often as you can.  Write anywhere you can.  Write. Write. Write.

What’s all this got to do with confidence?  The more you write, the more confident you’ll be when writing.  You’ll make bolder choices.  Ideas will come to you more easily, and the turns of phrase will come pouring out of your keyboard (pen, pencil, or into your digital recorder) so much quicker.

Writing is a difficult path. It may never seem easy, and every day is different.  You might find yourself writing thousands of words one day, and the next day you struggle to string a coherent sentence together.  Even so, the more you do it the more you will hone your skills, grow your talent, and make your writing that much more intuitive.  

Being intuitive and quicker to come up with a phrase or a word when you want to will enhance your own opinion of your writing.  We are often our own worse critics.  If you can convince yourself that you’re improving, you will feel like writing.

Your confidence in your writing will make you willing to write more often, will even make it harder not to write. 

It’s then that you’ll find all those words you’ve written are far better than you thought they were, and better than you ever imagined they would be.

Writing is a dream for so many of us, but confidence in your abilities as a writer can make it a reality.